Orð og tunga - 26.04.2018, Page 72

Kendra Willson: Splitting the atom 61
ature which represent working class experience in local economies
dominated by gúanóverksmiðjur, ‘guano factories’. The word gúanó-
verk smiðja has 11 att estations in ROH, starting from the nineteenth
century, all of which appear to refer to the phenomenon literally.
The guano poets represent a popular movement from around 1980,
identifi ed with the working class (cf. Silja Aðalsteinsdótt ir 1980). The
term is specifi cally associated with Bubbi Morthens and Utangarðs-
menn and may stem from the line in “Aldrei fór ég suður” (I never
went south [to Reykjavík]) “mig þyrstir í eitt hvað annað / en gúanó,
tékka og lín” [I thirst for something other than guano, checks and
linen]. It is also invoked in some other song lyrics, e.g. Gúanóstelp-
an mín” [My guano girl] (text Ragnar Kjartansson) (Aldrei fór ég
suður … 2014). This is in implicit contrast with the atom poets, who
are portrayed as abstruse and pretentious, although the atom poets
of the 1950s were concerned with the helplessness of the common
man in a dysfunctional world. Helgi Grímsson (1982:606) writes that
“Gúanórokkið … skelfdi marga og skar í brag- og atómeyru” [Guano
rock … startled many and pierced the metrical and atom ear]. Here
the atómeyra ‘atom ear’ is an ear for modern poetry, parallel to brag eyra
‘metrical ear’, the intuition for alliteration and traditional form that
Einar Benediktsson (1952:328) regarded as an Icelandic national trea-
sure. The popular music genre of guano rock is intended to supplant
both the tradition and the modern academic establishment which the
atom poets have by then become in the popular imagination.
The parallelism or contrast between gúanó- and atóm- compounds
in the quotations above suggests that the latter may have influenced
the coining of the former. The model of atóm- may have contributed
to the cultural intelligibility of the gúanó- compounds. However,
gúanó- does not seem to have been nearly as productive or long-lived
as atóm-, and the range of contexts of use and connotations is much
more limited.
10 Conclusion
Icelandic compounds in atóm- illustrate Downing’s (1977) observation
that novel compounds can be interpreted with a wide range of
semantic relations between the modifier and the base word, some of
which evoke frames or scripts from culture-specific contexts.
The connotations of atóm- compounds include many that are
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